by Richard Subber | Aug 24, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
you can’t change your socks…
Book review:
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
by Eugene B. Sledge (1923-2001)
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
326 pages
Marine Cpl. Eugene B. Sledge (his Marine buddies called him “Sledgehammer”) knew there is no glory in combat. There is fear, comradeship, pain, duty, hunger, honesty, sadness, loyalty, and death.
With the Old Breed is a shockingly restrained and horribly candid account of Sledge’s experiences in the attacks on Peleliu and Okinawa by the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, of the 1st Marine Division in the last year of World War II.
Read it, and you can mumble their prayers as you share the troubled joy of combat soldiers who survive the fighting in which their friends die.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 12, 2023 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
rediscover reasons for living…
Scent of a Woman
If you think that all good movies have Super Bowl excitement, don’t bother watching Scent of a Woman (1992, rated R, 157 minutes).
This obviously many-splendored film has grit, gusto, a pretty good tango, a red jaguar with pedal to the metal, a man confronting the downside of his life, a young man struggling with right and wrong, and the mystical mix of truth, justice, and passion.
Army lieutenant colonel Frank Slade (Al Pacino, he won his only Oscar for Best Actor) rides the tiger of his past. He and Baird School student Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) work through the highs and the lows of Slade’s blindness and Charlie’s rush to maturity as they learn about themselves and slowly learn to trust each other.
Pacino won the Oscar for his sensitive portrayal of Slade, who rediscovers reasons for living, his own humanity, his devotion to integrity, and his grandchildren. If you’re a grandparent, you’ll probably agree that the last 90 seconds of the film may not be the best moments, but they are the endearing gift of Scent of a Woman.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 17, 2023 | History, Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
…a perfection of evil…
Movie review:
Conspiracy
The Wannsee Conference in Hitler’s Germany, January 1942
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth (2001)
Here’s the short version: watching Conspiracy is like drinking molten lead.
Conspiracy is an almost flawless portrayal of naked evil being done by powerful men, each of whom has lost or abandoned his moral compass.
It is dry, withering, completely transparent, all too believable—not merely because we know it’s all true. We know that there are powerful men and women alive today who are willing to do blasphemously wrong things like killing 6 million Jews.
Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference that first officially articulated the Final Solution for the Jews of Europe: the Holocaust.
Stanley Tucci as SS Major Adolph Eichmann, Kenneth Branagh as Hitler’s Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich, Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (a lawyer who wrote the racist Nuremberg Laws), and 12 others show how it was probably done—almost without passion—around a long conference table in a manor house outside Berlin. One of the participants failed to destroy his copy of the minutes. This surviving document was used in the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials.
Conspiracy is frightening, horrifying, and disgusting. It is a perfection of the evil that men can do.
The antidote for watching it is simple: do a good thing every day.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 28, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
self-serving lies, and dreams…
Book review:
The Self-Made Man in America:
The Myth of Rags to Riches
by Irvin G. Wyllie (1920-1974)
New York, The Free Press, 1954
210 pages
The Self-Made Man in America is a historian’s delight.
Wyllie offers the multiple meanings of “the self-made man” throughout American history, connecting historical elements of the American dream and the self-serving promotion of the concept by titans of industry and their bankers.
There is a panoply of quotations from key decision-makers throughout the decades that aid the reader in understanding how Americans at all ranks in the socioeconomic spectrum advocated, criticized, and embodied the siren song of “the self-made man.”
To be sure, Wyllie plainly states his verdict: “Throughout all our history the self-made man was the exception not the rule…success has been for the few, not the many….Men who occupy the lowest places in our society have known the facts for a long time…but…men on the bottom need dreams.” (p. 174)
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
he’s sincere, but off the mark…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 22, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
toil and trouble….and craziness
Book review:
The Witches: Salem, 1692
by Stacy Schiff (b1961)
Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2015
498 pages
It may be that Stacy Schiff has neglected to include some fact or sentiment about the Salem witch trials, but I can’t imagine what it might be. The Witches is an expansive compendium of the whos and whats and whys and wherefores of this compelling—yet essentially impenetrable—story about a community gone crazy.
Maybe you had to be there to understand it.
It’s too easy to suggest that the McCarthy Communism hunting in 1954 is a modern analogy, but it won’t work. The whole dreadful McCarthy thing was a political football, approaching a sideshow even though it attracted the nominal attention of the nation and destroyed many lives.
The Salem witch trials (and the witch hunting that went on in neighboring towns) consumed the waking hours of all the townsfolk, who were deeply convinced that witches exist and that they were in league with satanic forces.
For my taste, Schiff tells too much of the story. I would have been content with a less detailed account. There is repetition that is dispensable.
For my taste, she struck a good balance between telling the story as it happened, and inviting the reader to suspect that the teenage girls were fooling all along, and that too many accusers had a personal reason to “get” the accused, and that too many religious and civic leaders who struggled unsuccessfully with their religious faith and the opposing impulses of their arguably decent selves had quickly figured out that the witch craze was a very nasty game.
You don’t need to read the whole book to figure out that there was some very destructive bogus stuff going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.
You don’t need to read the whole book to be convinced that some folks aren’t continuously motivated by a decent streak of good will and a desire to support communal well-being.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jul 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
Learn to think about being old…
Book review:
Old Friends
by Tracy Kidder (1945-2026)
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993
352 pages
Tracy Kidder was an old friend, and I welcome any opportunity to read something he wrote. There is vigor and bitter reality and calm truth and pulsing delight in his stories.
Whatever your age, try Old Friends. You’re going to be someone’s old friend, sooner or later. You can learn to think about how it’s going to be.
Like Kidder’s other books, Old Friends is in its own category. Nevertheless, it has themes you’ll find in his other books. It contains some kinds of the loneliness expressed in Strength in What Remains (2009), and it echoes some of the humanity that pervades Among Schoolchildren (1989).
You’ll be surprised as you get to know Lou and Joe and the others.
They’re like people you already know, and like real people you’re going to get to know.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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